


You could walk across the stars

by orphan_account



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Hope, POV Second Person, Pep Talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-15 23:30:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2247456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're scared of everything and don't see any future worth having. You want people to be happy but you continue failing and feel as if it is always your fault even when it is clearly not. You're too anxious to go out and do the things you used to enjoy. Then Eleven comes and give you a pep talk and makes everything better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You could walk across the stars

**Author's Note:**

> This was a meme prompt made when depressed several years ago. No one filled it. I don't remember filling it myself. It was a bad night. But in the morning this was sitting in an open word document on my laptop. Reading it stopped me from doing something regrettable and irreversible.
> 
> Posting it here on the chance that it might help others. It's orphaned, because it seems odd to take credit for something which you don't recall creating.
> 
> To whatever spirit possessed my keyboard that night -
> 
> Thank you.

You're sitting alone feeling like you could break into pieces and be swallowed by the earth.

"Hey there," someone says. The voice is soft and rough and young and old. It's familiar, but it can't be.

You look up and it's him.

"But you aren't real," you say. But he's looking down at you with impossibly ancient eyes and you know that, whatever this is, it isn't a hallucination or a dream. It's him. Somehow. And he came when you were curled away with your self-pity, and you hate yourself because you aren't the kind of person he travels with. Because he only takes the best, not whatever you are.

"Big universe. Smart person like you, I wouldn't think you would dismiss the possibility of my existence so readily."

"Not that smart," you say, ducking your head.

He crouches down in front of you. His eyes drift back and forth over your bowed face.

"There you go dismissing possibilities again," he says.

"It's hopeless," you tell him.

"In my experience it rarely is," he says. "Do you want to talk about it?"

You do. You don't. "I don't." You do. You so achingly do.

He nods and sits beside you. He rambles:

"Once I was surrounded by these klaxion mine beetles. They were blocking the exit and the only way away from them was to jump right into the mine cart, pull the lever, and go shooting down into the mine – which was their nest by the way…"

"And so I told him that you could make an omelette without cracking any eggs if you inverted the dimensions of the eggs over the fry pan. Unfortunately, the resulting omelette had purple stripes and tasted like tree bark, but that was hardly my fault and I did prove the point…"

"And that's why mops are the coolest of the common cleaning supplies!"

You smile at the last story and at the absolute sincerity of his declaration. You remember the bow ties and the fez. You remember all of the things you're afraid to wear and afraid to do.

"Why are you here?" you ask him.

"I got a distress signal," he says.

Your breath hitches. There are aliens somewhere and he's stopping to cheer you up? No, but it couldn't – you didn't send any message. You won't expect him to reply even if you did.

"I'm not – "

"I think you'll find you are," he tells you. And before you can cry again he wraps you into a hug. "You are so, so worth it. You are an amazing and unique person with an amazing and unique life in front of you and a million, billion possibilities ahead of you. So many choices and opportunities even I can't tangle them all out."

"I don't see any of them."

"Of course you don't. You're only human, stumbling from one day to the next wondering where it will all lead, but I've got the Time Lord time sense. Your future is simply massive. It's filled with so much stuff. There's great ordinary stuff like paying bills and having meals out with friends and getting caught out in the rain after dark and getting splashed by the bus going through a giant puddle and oh! There's other stuff as well which I won't spoil for you but it's amazing."

"You feel like you're alone, but you're not. There are millions of lonely people on this planet waiting for someone to reach out to them, so few of them realize that they're going about it the wrong way. You've got to get up and reach out yourself and you do that. Right now you're being hard on yourself. You've got all of your amazing ability to reach out and help and to feel others all focused inward to punch yourself."

"And it's not a very pleasant feeling, believe me, I know. Self-hate is not a good emotion. Nor is it an easy one to leave behind…"

He trails off and shakes his head.

"Please tell me what's wrong," he says to you. "I'm the Doctor. I'm good at finding solutions."

So you tell him. You tell him all of it. You tell him the parts that seem stupid and trivial in comparison to what he's faced and he nods and wrinkles his brow. You tells him the impossible situations and the things that you've lost. You tell him the hope that you've forgotten to hope for, for far too long. And he says not a word, but he holds your hand and he listens like no one ever has.

"That's hard," he says at the end, and you can tell that he doesn't think it's trivial or unimportant. He thinks that it's just as difficult and uncertain as battling a fleet of Daleks. And he thinks that you can succeed. He knows it. You can see in his eyes that you will succeed; you will get through this.

"I'm not sure I can do this," you tell him.

"None of us are," he tells you, and he kisses your brow. "But you are exceptional."

When he leaves and you hear the sound of his magic box fade off into the night; when you stand and face the darkness alone, you think of his words. You think of the possibilities laying beyond the stars and down the street. You think of the possibilities in yourself and, for the first time in a long time, you believe in them.


End file.
